At the recent high-level confab of the
North American Forum in Banff, an assistant U.S. secretary of state chaired
a panel that featured a presentation by Prof. Robert Pastor, author of a
book promoting the development of a North American union as a regional government
and the adoption of the amero as a common monetary currency to replace the
dollar and the peso.

State Department spokesman Eric Watnik confirmed to
WND that Thomas A. Shannon attended the Sept. 12-14 meeting of the North
American Forum in his official capacity as assistant secretary of state
for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

As WND previously reported, the forum was closed to
the press. WND has published the attendee list and the agenda of the conference
which was leaked to WND by Canadian writer and publisher Mel Hurtig.

In numerous publications, professional presentations
and testimony to Congress, Pastor has called for NAFTA to be evolved into
a European Union-like regional government, ultimately complete with a legislative,
judicial and executive institutional structure that would have supremacy
over the United States.

Pastor is director of the Center for North American
Studies at American University in Washington, D.C.

The State Department told WND Shannon was not endorsing
Pastor's comments, yet the agency has no intention of making public Shannon's
comments on the panel, nor Pastor's speech.

The North American Forum is a shell organization with
no officer or business address, consisting of the three individuals who
co-chaired the Banff meeting: George Schultz, former secretary of state
under President Reagan; Canadian Peter Lougheed, the former Alberta premier
and former leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta; and
Mexico's Pedro Aspe, the former secretary of the Treasury of Mexico.

In the printed agenda for the Banff meeting, the panel
chaired by Shannon is listed as follows:

Robert Pastor, Director, Center for North American
Studies, American University

Roger Gibbins, President & CEO, Canada West Foundation

Andrés Rozenthal, Mexican Council on Foreign
Relations

The State Department website documents that Shannon
addressed a group of Canadian diplomats, academics and Fulbright scholars
in Ottawa Sept.14 in which he discussed the North American Forum conference
in Banff.

In the speech, entitled "Why the Americas Matter,"
Shannon characterized the North American Forum as "a parallel structure
to the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America." Shannon
described SPP as designed to "enhance NAFTA" and again as "an
add-on to NAFTA."

Andrés Rozenthal is listed as chairman of the
North American Forum on Integration, or NAFINA, an organization of which
Pastor also is listed as a member of the board of directors. WND >previously
reported on NAFINA's "Triumverate," a model North American parliament
annually held for student delegates from the U.S., Mexico and Canada.